System of badges :-)

[AF>Libristes] nico8313
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Topic 196652

Hello to all
Hello Einstein@Home

Could you create a system of badges to motivate cruncheur in order to stimulate computation and competition ?
I give you an example:

100,000 pts Badge Bronze
500,000 pts Badge Silver
1,000,000 pts Badge Gold
10,000,000 pts Badge Ruby
100,000,000 pts Badge Emerald
800,000,000 pts Badge Sapphire
5,000,000,000 pts Badge Diamond

when do you think?
would be a good thing in my opinion

See you soon :-) thk

Michael Karlinsky
Michael Karlinsky
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System of badges :-)

Quote:

Hello to all
Hello Einstein@Home

Could you create a system of badges to motivate cruncheur in order to stimulate computation and competition ?

Hi,

I like the idea of badges, so it is also possible for someone w/ a small amount of credit to "show off".

So they should not just reflect the amount of credit (as you proposed), but sth. different. Like contribution to papers (like GPUGrid does).

Badges for pulsar discoveries, badges for participation in sub-projects (by credit)...

Just my 0,02€.

KR
Michael

[AF>Libristes] nico8313
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Hi Michael, Thank you for

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your answer.
I Hope that a system of badges Could be Implemented.
If you have any ideas, do not hesitate to say :-)

Nico

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
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Hi! The following is just

Hi!

The following is just my personal opinion, I'm not speaking for the project staff here.

I must confess that I'm kind of old fashioned and I tend to think that it is sufficient to give the numbers for total credits and RAC, and that adding some discrete threshold steps where you would get some visual 'badge' or whatever doesn't add anything useful at all.

Another concern is this: should the badges be based on total credits or on RAC? E@H is active since 2005, and newcomers might get frustrated by the long time it will take them to catch up in order to get one of the highest medals, while others holding a badge for past crunching might even have ceased contributing and still enjoy the 'celebrity' status of a high badge.

In any case I want to avoid by all means the false impression that we only care about the power crunchers. The fundamental idea of BOINC has always been to harvest 'surplus' computation power, using PCs that are otherwise used for something else. I personally would not want to discourage anyone of this (far larger) user group by putting too much emphasis on competition for higher RAC or total credit numbers. I haven't done the statistics yet but I'm quite sure that most of the computing power of E@H is generated by casual users.

Also, there are more ways to contribute to Einstein@Home in addition to donating CPU and GPU cycles, e.g. by discussing problems and solutions wrt BOINC and the science apps in the forum, or simply by spreading the word about E@H.

But that's just my opinion. We are planning a complete overhaul of the forum and during this process, I'm quite sure the idea will be discussed internally by the project staff.

Cheers
HB

Neil Newell
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Also as computing power

Also as computing power increases, badges that once took serious effort to earn would become trivially easy (using next years 256-core CPUs...).

Perhaps ranking by credits per day or by percentage of daily work would be more of an incentive.

Logforme
Logforme
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RE: Perhaps ranking by

Quote:
Perhaps ranking by credits per day or by percentage of daily work would be more of an incentive.


Can't really see what this "ranking" would do for me. But if you like to compete there is always BOINCStats: E@H sorted by RAC

Horacio
Horacio
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I think that if the badges

I think that if the badges are to be shown only on the forums it wont give any advantage, as current credits and RAC are already shown, and I guess that the "crunching power" that comes from the forum members is a very small percentage of the total...

But, the badges could be a good incentive to priorize (and balance) a certain app over the others, for example if the project where having too much people working on BRP than on GWS, then giving badges for completing a certain number of valid tasks for the GWS will attract more users to do work for that app...
Anyway, I think it's too complex, and once the search is over as the new members will never be able to get those old badges, they can perceive it as kind of unfair or frustrating...

Now, one thing that could be a nice eyecandy if the forums are going to be revamped could be to show a "dynamic title" under the name of the users based on their "join age", credits and/or RAC... Im sure this is not hard to implement and as the list of tittles can grow as needed it wont be an issue when the computing powers rises, at worst the first titles will become very easy, but the last ones will always be a good challenge.

Raph
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Hi all! Personally, I

Hi all!

Personally, I think that a badges system would be a great idea. I must confess that from time to time, I try others project than E@H and many of those project have a badges system. The first thing you have in mind when you earn a badge is to get the next one :)

I understand the concern of Bikeman, but personally, I don't think that newcomers will feel frustrated by those one that crunch for years to get those badges.

@Neil: It is true that with the growing computing power of new pc, the badges will become easier to get, but this is not different from Cobblestones. Some years ago, reaching the 1 000 000 credits with a P3 or P4 was a hard task, and now with a small pc with gpu, it can be reach in couple of weeks.

Moreover, as others noted, I think that a badges system would be a way to balanced the computing power. For exemple, it is simple to estimate the RAC/second of the different applications and decide to crunch only the ones that give the more RAC. With a set of badges for each application, it encourage cruncher to get all applications.

Also, it give a more fine tuned reward system than RAC and Cobblestones. For example, reaching 50 000 RAC of CPU power is not the same business then GPU power. Also, with applications specific badges, it rewarded the ones that does't necessarily have the more RAC, but involved since the beginning. It is a way of saying: "Look, you crunch 100 times more than me, but I make my effort too, a earn the S3 badge because I'm crunching here for many years!"

Just to give an example, this is the badges system of yoyo@home: http://www.rechenkraft.net/wiki/index.php?title=Yoyo%40home/badges
I think the system is well balanced, it is easy to get your first badges, but really hard to get the last ones.

In my opinion, a badges system will help to keep the participants involved (by regularly checking her account for new badges and in the same time, maybe see that oh, this computer stop crunching, I better check what happen!) more than discouraged or frustrated them.

Keep crunching!
Raph

microchip
microchip
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+1 for badges!

+1 for badges!

MohMan
MohMan
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+1 for badges. As it's

+1 for badges.

As it's been said, when there's a badge system, I try to get more and more badges. In my opinion it's a really good system to keep participants in the project.

[AF>France>Astro]Spica
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+1 for badges I agree with

+1 for badges

I agree with Nico who proposed this idea and others that have recently posted here.
The badge system is certainly the best system that measures the real involvment of participants into a project. This is far much than the amount of credits that is now meaningless due to the large difference of credits attribution from one project to another considering the same time of computation (factor much larger than 10 considering GPU projects). I am crunching on E@H from the early days of the project (January 2005) and I think that it is really misssing to this fantastic project which is, for sure, the most stable from all the projects I am crunching on for now nearly 10 years...

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